Saviour
by akira101
Summary: Three times Regina thinks of Emma and how she has saved her.
1. Chapter 1

**Disclaimer: **Once Upon a Time is owned by people who are not me.

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That's the second time you've saved my life now; once in the fire, and now this. As if I needed any more reasons to be in your debt. When you cried my name and pushed me from the wraith's path I was only aware of two things. The first was Henry, simply because he's my son and I'm always aware of him, especially if he might be in danger. The second was the sound of your voice as you shouted my name. It's taken me three days since you've been gone to realise that the sound in your voice I found so strange was fear. For years I'd become accustomed to my name being said in fear, had even relished it at one point or another, so to hear someone shout my name in fear that was _for_ my safety, well, it took me by surprise.

You have a habit of doing that. And for the most part, I don't take too well to surprises; certainly not to you coming into town and certainly not to you deciding to stay. But I knew who you were, so it shouldn't have surprised me when you decided to overstay your welcome.

I can honestly say you're exactly what I expected and at the same time not at all. You're good, _sickeningly_ good, despite a less than rosy childhood and whether or not you believe it yourself. You're strong, physically and mentally, like I suppose any child of Snow White and Prince Charming would be, loathe though I am to admit it. But you're also like me in some ways, and to have common ground with the daughter of Snow disgusts me at the same time as it fills me with a bitter sense of satisfaction.

_Loneliness_. It's one of the most obvious things about you, apart from your love for Henry and your thinly veiled suspicion of me. At one time or another I imagine you've felt as alone as I have, though with the curse broken, I doubt you'll ever feel that way again. That is, if you make it out of wherever the hell you are.

Or if you're even alive at all.

I don't know what it would do to Henry if you haven't survived. It used to itch at my skin, the way he took to you so quickly, and to see the smile that lit up his face when you would visit reminded me of the resentment I used to feel for your mother. Sometimes it still does, but I learnt to detach myself from those moments with the knowledge that the curse was intact, you had no legal rights to him, and I had all the time in the world to fix things with him. I'm not sure if any of those things still apply now. The first certainly doesn't.

If you're gone, I'm not sure anything between Henry and I could be salvaged. The night of you and Snow being pulled into the portal, he told me he didn't understand why you would save me. Why the saviour would push me out of danger's way when everyone finally knew who I truly was. What could I tell him, when I was wondering the same thing? Is it just your innate goodness that makes you save me, like an inherent reflex that just doesn't allow someone like you to leave someone vulnerable? Or do you actually want to?

Of course you don't.

When I told Henry that you saved me because that's just what heroes do, it tasted like acid coming from my mouth. You should have seen the pride emanating from him for you, his _mother_, the hero of the tale. His small voice, telling me he was happy that you did save me, is the only thing that's given me hope that my relationship with him can be mended.

But if you've died pushing me to safety instead of jumping there yourself, I might just find a way to kill you again myself.

Henry is my happy ending, so I need you to be alive. For him, and I suppose for me as well in turn, I need you to come home.

And leave Snow in Fairytale Land, if you could.

–Henry wouldn't like that thought.

I'm not doing magic, you know, even though I can practically feel it slithering down my throat every time I breathe. It's in the air now, sitting heavy on my skin, and the scent of it pulls me back to black corsets and towering castles and the overwhelming feeling of power that came with magic as advanced as mine was. But Henry has asked me not to – he thinks he's going to save me.

Maybe he is. Or change me in the very least.

For every day magic is here in Storybrooke and every day that passes since the curse was broken I feel more and more like my old self. Though he's not living with me now, I try to spend as much time as I can with Henry, just to keep me grounded in this reality. The fact that I want to stay grounded gives me hope too; the old Regina would never have considered change.

And if there is one person in this world or another who can change me, it's Henry.

If there was another, I think it would be you. I'm not entirely sure why.

A small part of me has a clue – the same part of me, I think, that spends time thinking of the sort of love I once had with Daniel. That said, I'm under no pretence or conviction that what I feel for you is love. It isn't. It's more just that you're there and I imagine you always will be. Henry is ours in a way, so if I were to conceive a future of mine and see him there, I think I would see you too.

I do feel for you though, in a way I'm not sure I can even describe. In these moments since you've been gone when I think about you – and there are more of them than you would think – my gut feels an acute sense of _something_. I don't want to call it loss, the word has too much meaning attached to it, but you're not there anymore. Not _here_. You've been a constant thorn in my side since you came to Storybrooke and now you're gone. I guess I'd gotten used to you.

In the same moments, I also imagine your return; envisage the arguments I know we'll have about Henry, and what I did to your parents, and probably what I did to you as well. I know I took away your childhood and your family, but while whatever good remains in me knows to feel regret over doing that to an innocent child, it did all lead to Henry, and how can I possibly regret that.

Besides, the only thing vaguely _princess_ about you is your looks, and though I wouldn't dream of telling you this, I imagine you would have made a strong and beautiful queen one day, if I'd let you. As you are now, well, I think you would have been far more comfortable living and working on a farm, much like your father used to, than attending to royal formality and ceremony.

It does puzzle me, though, why you're in my thoughts so often. Yes, you are intrinsically linked with Henry's happiness at the moment, but I've dreamt of you these past two nights. In the first, you and the rest of the town tied me to my apple tree, your father's sword in your hand as you threatened me and Henry shunned me. The second was different, less obvious, and most of it has evaded me now. All I recall is that it was just you and I in the kitchen of my home and I woke up crying.

Another thing I will never tell you.

I'm seeing Henry tomorrow morning, and as he has every time I've seen him in the past three days, he will ask me if I've figured out a way to get you home. Apparently the Evil Queen should be well versed in travelling between universes. It's nice though, having him trust me enough to find a way to get you back home. My resources are severely limited in this world, but with the help of Rumplestiltskin, I think we can find a way to bring you home.

And since I am devoting virtually all of my time to bringing you back, you better not be dead, Miss Swan. Henry needs you, and I'll be damned if I let you die because you saved _my_ life.

Idle threats aside, the truth is I don't think you're dead at all. I think you're too stubborn to die and leave Henry in my care. And if there's one thing I've learnt about you since you came to Storybrooke, it's that you are exactly who the stories said you would be.

I believe you were made to save people, Emma. Even people like me.

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**A/N:** Hi there. I haven't written in quite a while, and this was more an exercise to get the writing juices flowing again, so I can work on another Swan Queen story I'm writing. If you have any pointers or words of encouragement, please let me know.


	2. Chapter 2

You're back now. It took just over a month to get you home, and I think it's fair to say my only contribution was putting a sleeping curse on yet another member of your family. Henry didn't mind me using magic though, as long as it was for you. We talked that day when I made the curse, really talked, and it was almost as if he was my son again. _My_ Henry.

But like I said, you're back now. And he's living with you, of course he is; you and Snow and Charming – the fairy tale family that people like you dream about and people like me know better than to hope for. You've only been a real family for the week since you came home, and even though I sometimes notice a slight edginess to your manner, as if you aren't used to that much love being directed at you so explicitly, I can now see that the breaking of the curse and the four of you reuniting was much of an inevitability, because that's just what your family does. You find each other.

It's nothing if not irritating.

Your return wasn't quite what I expected. Since James went under the curse, I had temporarily moved into your mother's apartment to look after Henry and your father. Not that a person under a sleeping curse needs much, but it was nice all the same to feel my son want me around. When you and your mother stumbled into the apartment at four in the morning in tattered clothes, looking exhausted and bruised and more than a little disorientated, I don't think the Evil Queen studying books of magic on the couch was the first thing you wanted to see.

It certainly wasn't Snow's. The murderous glare she sent my way was exactly as I remember it looking twenty eight years ago, but I waved her off and told her that her sleeping prince was waiting for her in her room.

In my defence, I was just trying to find a way to bring you home.

After that it was just me and you, and like any mother would after being away from her son for so long, the first thing you asked for was Henry. As I helped you get to the couch, a large gash evident in your lower leg through your ripped jeans, and I called out for Henry, the first thought that flickered through my mind was one of fear. As much as I had willed your return, done everything in my power to help you get back, you were actually home now, and I had no idea what that meant for me as the Evil Queen or for me as Henry's mother.

The second thought I had, as Henry threw himself beside you and you buried yourselves in each other's arms, hit me stronger than the first.

I had _missed_ you.

As I sat on the coffee table in front of the couch watching the two of you embrace, I realised I had missed you. I hope you didn't notice, but for the life of me I couldn't tear my eyes away from you. You were there and real and I had touched you, and the relief that filled my chest reminded me of watching you emerge from the mine all those months ago, with Henry safe in your arms.

An urge filled me then to sit next to you on the couch, simply to be closer to you, and that turned my thoughts back to fear, because what the hell was I thinking feeling this way? Feeling relief at your return that had absolutely nothing to do with Henry and everything to do with the fact that I had missed _you_. At one time I likened you to a thorn in my side that wasn't there anymore, but the truth is ever since I saw you almost fall through the apartment door, all I've felt is warmth. Even since I moved back to my place, in spite of only seeing Henry for a small period of time each day, I feel warmth in my stomach that I can only reasonably attribute to one thing.

You.

Before the curse was broken, the very sight of you would frustrate me. Everything – from those moments I would see you interact with Henry and he would show you more love than I had seen in months, to the infuriating way you always had the gall to stand up to me, even as I had you thrown in jail – it all got so far under my skin that just hearing your voice bothered me.

Now at night when I'm at home, and I lie in my bed and think of how drastically you've changed things, sometimes I think I can hear your voice inside my head. Other times, when I spend too long thinking of the anger I once had for Snow and the grief I felt over Daniel and I feel myself regressing, I imagine your voice and it quiets me. You don't say anything particularly comforting or soothing, it's more a replay of moments when I felt some sort of mutual understanding between us. Like that night you returned, as I cleaned the dried blood from your calf because your parents were too wrapped up in each other to help you themselves and Henry had fallen back to sleep on the couch, you told me in the frankest voice that my mother was an even bigger bitch than I was. I think that was the first time we shared a genuine smile.

Or the next day, when a rested and clear-minded Snow tore from her room on a war path heading for me, your voice silenced her accusations when you told her I had barely slept for the month you were gone because I promised I would find a way to get you home.

Henry must have told you that.

I'm not entirely sure why recalling moments like that helps me, but I'm not ignorant enough to think that it doesn't mean anything. While I might not understand the reasons behind it, I know you have become someone important in my life. Someone integral, maybe, like Henry.

I'm surprised to say that such thoughts don't fill me with any modicum of distaste at all. If anything, I feel a sort of emptiness at the notion that while I am so keenly aware of your presence in my life, I honestly doubt you think of me at all. If there was one question I could ask you, with the knowledge and security that no repercussions would follow, I would ask you if you ever thought of me.

No, wait. I don't think I would want to know at all.

I'm seeing you tomorrow, and Henry. The routine of the three of us having lunch together, even though you're still a little wary around me, are the only parts of my day worth looking forward too. Henry gives me reason to smile just by being with him, and you, well, I'm finding I enjoy your company more than I thought possible.

You can even make me laugh, and there are few people in this world or the last that can do that. Yesterday as we ate at Granny's and yet another town resident came up to tell me exactly how I had wronged him, Henry became quiet and unsettled. Though he doesn't talk about it with me anymore, I imagine he still struggles with knowing who I am. But as he grew quieter, you did something I think only you would have the nerve to do. You flicked my ear, hard, ruffled my hair, and turned to Henry and said, _if she was evil, do you think I could have gotten away with that?_ Thirty years ago, I actually would have killed you for that, but the fact that I laughed went a long way with Henry, because he was laughing too. I know you did it to make him feel better, but I also think you did it for me too.

I should have thanked you for that.

That's the thing that makes you different from everyone else in this town. You don't think of me as the Evil Queen because you never really knew her, and that affords me a certain freedom that I don't have with anyone else besides Henry.

But it is more than that. Around you and around our son, I don't feel like the Evil Queen anymore, and if you even can at all, I think that's the way you might save me.

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**A/N:** So thanks to the person who asked for a two-shot. Character muses are very fun to write, especially with wonderful characters like Regina. Off to write less muse-y things now that have actual action. If you have any constructive criticism or anything else you would like to say, please let me know.


	3. Chapter 3

**A/N:** Just note the rating change, guys. Not sure how that happened.

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It's my birthday today. You and Henry are the only people who know that. You aren't awake yet, but I know you have something planned and that touches me more than you could ever know. I don't know what it is you have in mind but truthfully it doesn't matter, because I haven't celebrated a birthday in over thirty years and I think this is the first time I might want to.

This year, I actually feel like I have something worth celebrating.

It's only been six months since you came home but everything has changed, in the most marvellous and surprising of ways. I'm still at odds with most of the town and I imagine it will be many years before that changes, but I won't pretend that whatever leniency I've been granted isn't entirely due to you. It is, and I am very thankful to you for that.

Because of you, Henry is still my son. In the time he spent living with you and your family, my house was just that – a house. Without Henry, it was nothing of the home we had made for ourselves for ten years. Now, the fact that he lives with me once more is beyond anything I could have hoped for. That he actually _wants_ to, provided we both spend time with you every day, is probably more than I deserve, but even a redeemed me couldn't care less about 'deserve' when it means having Henry back in my life.

He really needn't have worried about making that stipulation, though – you spend more time at this house than you do at your own.

Especially since that night.

I think it would surprise you if you knew how often I thought of that night. When I'm alone, or when we sit quietly together after one of us has put Henry to bed – both of us if he's lucky – I wonder how we wound up where we did. If I were to ask you now, you would say it was three glasses of wine on your part and the fact that I could never resist you in those god-awful jackets. I'm not sure I can articulate how much it was _not_ the jacket, but rather the fact that for me, it was four months of wanting to spend ten more minutes with you at lunch, of suggesting we go for ice-cream after an already long afternoon outing, and of wishing you wouldn't leave immediately after Henry went to bed each night you came for dinner.

– You still don't know any of that.

So when you leaned over to brush your lips against mine for the first time, I didn't pull you closer by your jacket because I _liked_ your jacket, but because I had wanted you to do that for months. I had only ever kissed a man's lips, so to kiss you was softer than I had imagined, and yes I had imagined it. The times I let myself were few – it seemed as pointless as it was dangerous – but when I did I'm almost embarrassed at how something as simple as the thought of your lips could affect me.

That's another way you've changed me. Before you, I wouldn't have dreamed of seeing something I wanted and not taking it; of sitting idly by and only watching and not having whatever it was that I desired. But though I imagined what it might feel like to kiss your lips, I never would have been the first to do it. Some of my inaction I suppose was due to fear – fear that it could ruin whatever the two of us shared so seamlessly with Henry if I was alone in my feelings. The rest I think was due to something else, something so entirely removed from _me_ that it took me a while to understand.

The truth was I didn't want to _take_ anything from you. Too many times were there in the past when I could scarcely differentiate between what I had taken and what had been freely given. But it was more than that too. It was a matter of giving – of you willingly giving something to me for no other reason than you wanted to. So in the moment that you leant towards me, hesitantly at first as if you expected me to pull away, I knew it wasn't because I had convinced you or manipulated you or even forced you.

You just wanted to.

You actually wanted to kiss me, and when you gave that to me – the way it felt to have your hand in my hair and your tongue tentatively touching mine – the only moment I can possibly compare it to in hindsight is kissing Daniel. And I'm not unaware of the magnitude of that.

Truthfully, I felt like a teenager again. Like I could have kissed you all night and that would have been enough. But when you grabbed my hand, laced your fingers through mine and pulled me from the couch in the direction of my bedroom, I knew kissing wasn't going to come close to enough. For either of us.

When you shut my bedroom door and pushed me against it, the feel of your body pressed so tightly to mine was unbelievable. I couldn't think, could barely stand, from the way it felt to have your mouth on my neck and the skin of your back beneath my hands. My one coherent thought at the time was that you had no idea what you were doing to me or how easily you were affecting me.

You probably still don't.

You might have had an idea later on though, when against the door you opened my slacks and slipped your hand inside and felt how wet I was for you. The instant you touched me you stopped moving entirely, and for a second I panicked because maybe this was your first time being with a woman and maybe this was moving too quickly and maybe you regretted it all. But then you swore and whispered my name as if you were surprised at what you felt, and began to move your fingers almost reverently, stroking me and pressing your mouth back against mine and swallowing my moan.

No one else has ever made me feel like that.

That was the first time you made me come against that door, and when you pulled back slightly to watch my face as it happened, your eyes held mine to yours because I couldn't look away either, not when you were watching me with an expression I can only describe as wonder, at how my body was reacting to you, maybe, or how the words _please_ and _Emma_ continuously fell from my lips as if I was accustomed to pleading with you for things.

That was also the first time you called me beautiful. You've since become much less quaint with your compliments during sex, though I'm not entirely complaining.

When you wake up I might tell you what that night meant to me. Beyond us, I mean, because as much as it meant for us as a couple, you can't imagine what it meant to me to have someone like you, someone so _good_ and so worthy of love, give yourself to me in that way simply because you wanted to.

You're the _saviour_, Emma, and if I were to say anything to you about that night, it would be that because of who you are, you loving me made me feel as if I were _good_.

That was two months ago now and every day that has passed since has increased that feeling. It's not a matter of forgetting all that I did – I know that redemption goes hand in hand with an awareness and regret for what I've done – but when I'm with you I think less of my mother and Daniel and a younger Snow, and that can only be a good thing.

Instead I think of you and Henry.

The two of you give me reason to celebrate and today I will, because for the first time in a very long time, I don't feel like I need saving.

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**A/N:** Wow I'm fickle. All it seems to take is one person saying 'why don't you keep going and write this' and I'm like TELL ME WHAT YOU WANT AND LET ME GIVE IT TO YOU! So whoever asked for happy got their happy – and slightly smutty, I guess, though I didn't intend that to begin with. But this is now complete, I swear. I have other OUAT stuff to write. Also, if you like, please review. They are always appreciated.


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